Sunday, December 2, 2012

Audioboo for National Day Narratives.

Traditional reading and writing have to change and assessment needs to rapidly change. Students need experience in new literacies required for the 21st century and ESL assessment needs to be overhauled to mirror the demands of new multi-modal literacies.

How do we capture the past for the future with new literacies available in the IPad ? We transform learning by thinking of new ways of creating and producing language in a meaningful context. Some ESL teachers love testing discrete grammar points. Is this what language proficiency is about ?

It is more meaningful for students to use a range of past tense structures to communicate what is important to their lives. Personalizing learning this week, we focused on the UAE National Day.

The founding father of the UAE, Sheik Zayed said:

"Future generations will be living in a world that is very different from that to which we are accustomed. It is essential that we prepare ourselves and our children for that new world.”

This new world is one of digitally connected Emirati citizens, building knowledge collaboratively and sharing with the world.. Students will not be filling in discrete gramnar gap fills in their future. They will need to communicate effectively in their second language.

We decided to transform learning by sharing and documenting the stories from the past by interviewing grandparents, finding old photos and translating the primary history narratives into English for National Day. Our App of choice was AudioBoo because of :

-The sound quality and 3 minute recording length.

-The ability to share on social media such as Twitter.

- Can embed an image.

Lesson

Task 1 - Students explored different Apps for sound recordings such as Soundfiles, but we focused on workflow and how we could share our recordings with Twitter. We found Audioboo.

Task 2 - Students discussed and tweeted their views of Audioboo and its use generally to improve language skills.

Task 3 - We discussed the meaning of National and the stories the students know of the past and the importance of documenting history for future generations.